Main Menu

Long Beach!

I spent this past weekend with my boyfriend at his family’s beach house–in Ocean Park, near Long Beach, Washington.

Ocean Park is a pretty stunning combination of nature-lovers, off-the-grid types, upper-class vacationers and shantytowns. Not that all of those are mutually exclusive.

I was especially a fan of the off-the-grid types:

“Violators will be violated”

This is the same house as the last one.

Sometimes, though, it was hard to tell what was private property. So I moved quickly.

Although it does not seem like it in this shot, this is a very small sign. It faces the ocean. I still have no idea where their property line actually ends and the great big wide world begins.

I don’t play with ISO much–usually it’s like, “Hey, whatever setting you just happen to be on! Let’s party!” But that’s because I’m usually taking indoor shots and I can make it work. That, and my insane death-flash.

But about halfway from the house to the actual beach, I noticed how pretty the clouds were–so I switched the ISO from 800 to 100 (a couple of the above, notably that last one, are 100).

Pretty!

Live birds!

Dead bird 😦

Ocean Park pretty much consists of beach houses, about a million billion RVs (rough estimate), an Eagles Hall, a bank, a pizza/burger/teriyaki joint, a country store, a Thriftway, a liquor store that tries its best to not look like a state-run venture:

There is a lot of America- and beach-themed decor and a fundraising jar for the senior center.

And one bar:

Doc’s. The one bar.

We wanted to go to the one bar, but the dudes at the pizza/teriyaki/burger joint (which was also /bbq that night) let us know that cabs do not exist in Pacific County, and that “normally it’s safe to just drive home” but the cops “have patrols out once in a while” and they had gotten an email that they were out this weekend. IT WOULD BE SAFE TO DRIVE DRUNK IF IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE MEDDLING COPS!!!!!!1!!

We actually went into Long Beach–like, once.

We got a drink at our favorite Long Beach bar. I like this shot because, while Long Beach thrives on tourism, the Long Beach Tavern does not seem to give a fuck.

A bunch of bros (what do you call bros that are like 5-10 years more grown up than the average bro but you can still tell they are bros?) started taking over the jukebox with what was probably the Best of Motley Crue Vol. 2, and a delightful man with a mullet yelled, “no headbanging music in the LBT!!”

After a couple of drinks, we went to the arcade and won some Rock’em Sock’em Robots. BALLER.

Besides that, since there are NO CABS ANYWHERE, we did most of our hard partying at home, with the forbidden, flourescent nectar that is Four and Joose.

On the way back, to distract myself from how FUCKING TERRIFIED I was from the Tokyo-drift back highways covered in snow, I started shoving my camera up against the windshield on bulb, which just picked up the reflection of the headlights on the road lines.

This was met with limited/varying success.

The moon looked pretty cool, so I kept trying to chase that, too, with understandably dismal results (but it was funnnnn).